Headache one: For what ever reason pfSense would not boot of a usb drive (tested same usb drive with ubuntu, and booted just fine) I got around this by just using the sata dvd/cd drive from my desktop…

Headache two: adding a NAT port forward will by default flush your state table, and I like to randomly add port fowards, and being on irc made this quite annoying,

To fix this you need to go to > System: Advanced: Miscellaneous and check the option:

Gateway Monitoring

States

By default the monitoring process will flush states for a gateway that goes down. This option allows to override this setting by not clearing states for existing connections.